Well, I might darn well have the whole book read before the book club discussion starts at Crunchy Chicken, but I’ve started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She is such a eloquent writer.
I’ve read the first 5 or 6 pages and was really struck by the passage about the impact of food and petroleum. All stuff I knew, but the actual statistics and the way she framed the information was very impacting. She wrote, “ If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.” Wow!
So glad I’m managing to buy 90% of my food locally and organically. Dinner tonight was local cheese, locally made bread (with local ingredients) and blueberries from my parent’s garden. Yum! In general, this week I managed to buy almost all my food at the farmer’s market. The only non-local from the grocery store items I got were chocolate chips and sugar (both organic). Darn sweet tooth!
The chocolate chips are for making mochas. I melt 1 tablespoon of chocolate chips in about a half-cup of milk (use the microwave for the least amount of electricity usage) and then pour in espresso. I make espresso on my stove top with a little Italian perk type pot. Better than just about any mocha you can buy at a much lower cost. All organic, all fair-trade. I know, I should give it up and just drink water but I’m not ready for that yet….
Other food experiments have been going well. The cider is fizzing away and it’s all I can do to leave it alone. I’m dehydrating corn at the moment. I think it’s going to be a great way to store corn so I’m going to get serious about growing corn next year (the slugs ate what I planted this year). I bought a teeny-tiny sample of dried blueberries to see if it would be worth dehydrating blue berries and decided that I might as well buy raisins if I want a dried fruit to store. I’ll figure out something else to do with any blueberries that come my way.
Which brings me to another thought. I’ve been thinking about how one school of thought is to only eat what’s in season. If I were able to follow that closely, there really wouldn’t be a need for stored foods. Yet I do think preserving foods is an important thing to do. For one thing, it makes sense to do something with surplus crops that are home grown. It’s one of the things that make gardening economical I think. Another good reason is just plain old emergency preparedness. I want something to eat if something happens in the middle of January! Local foods that are in season are pretty slim at that time.